Sensitivity estimation of spectroscopic optical coherence tomography

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the sensitivity of spectroscopic optical coherence tomogmphy (OCT) to small changes in the absorption properties of the imaged object as well as to evaluate its ability to resolve spatial variations in the object's absorption coefficient. Spectroscopic OCT would have the advantage to provide spatially resolved spectroscopic information at multiple wavelengths across the available bandwidth of the light source in a single measurement. An ultrahigh resolution OCT system based on a Ti:sapphire source emitting in the range of 700 nm to 900 nm with an optical bandwidth of up to 165 nm was used to measure optical absorption of specially designed, non-scattering phantoms. High speed and high resolution digitization in combination with a Morlet wavelet transform was utilized to derive spectroscopic information from the full interference OCT data. Using a non scattering phantom, the preliminary results of the present work reveal the challenges that have to be overcome in order to extract spatially resolved quantitative spectroscopic information by OCT.